A blog about weather, climate, and science. Occasionally, we'll post on other topics of interest.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

An Essential Tom Fuller Column, #2

Tom Fuller is an excellent environmental reporter. This column, "Greenpeace Morphs into Big Tobbaco" is essential reading on who are actually the "Davids" and who are the "Goliaths" in the field of global warming. Here are a couple of highlights:

Greenpeace is crossing a line. They are adopting the tactics of Big Tobacco in an effort to fight what they want you to think is a Big Tobacco array of interests against them...

But their [Greenpeace's] budget for one year is 10 times greater than all the money they say has been contributed to their opponents over the past 10 years. So is that of the World Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, etc. The report adds up 10 years of contributions to make the totals look bigger--ooh! Exxon gave the Cato Institute $125,000 over a 12 year period. The Cato Institute writes about every subject under the sun. Giving them $10,000 a year does not seem like funding a machine to attack climate change. It's the very conservative management of an energy company giving a token donation to a very conservative thinktank. I'm a progressive liberal. I oppose almost everything the Cato Institute has ever written. But come on, people. Get real. Is nobody even going to mention the $100 million Exxon donated to Stanford so Stephen Schneider can continue his advocacy of Greenpeace and the fight against global warming? Isn't that relevant to this discussion at all? Is nobody even going to mention the institutional donors to Phil Jones' CRU, and all the energy companies among them? How much money do the environmental NGOs receive from big energy companies, and why don't they publish that?